Bill Ralston 35 | Life
President Trump is forced to backtrack after publicly accepting the word of a despot.
As the US President flew to Helsinki for his summit with Vladimir Putin, someone online Photoshopped a picture of the baby Trump balloon flown over London during his visit there blended with the image of the zeppelin Hindenburg crashing in flames. It was an apt forecast of Trump’s performance.
It was hard to fault his tweet as he headed back to Washington on
Air Force One, “In order to build a brighter future, we cannot exclusively focus on the past – as the world’s largest two nuclear powers, we must get along.” However, by then the world was not listening to his spin; words like “treason” were being hurled at him.
Trump had astounded media, politicians from both sides of the US political divide, his own spies and, it seems, everyone on my Twitter feed by ignoring the advice of US intelligence agencies and publicly accepting Putin’s bland assurance that Russia played no subversive role in the 2016 American elections. (His subsequent backtrack, saying he had left out a vital negative, was unconvincing.)
It was a little odd considering the US Justice Department had just indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic emails during the 2016 presidential campaign. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has produced charges against or guilty pleas from 32 Russians and Americans in relation to Russian interference in US politics.
As the summit was about to begin, Russian woman Maria Butina was arrested and charged with acting as a Russian Federation agent who had established relationships with US politicians and a gun-lobby group.
“I don’t see any reason why [Russia would interfere in American politics],” Trump said, blithely ignoring the fact that, since the rule of the Romanovs, Russia has been interfering in the politics and life of other states. Nothing has changed in the past few centuries; ask Crimea.
Trump could have asked British Prime Minister Theresa May the week before the summit about the death of one person and severe illness of three others, allegedly thanks to a Russian assassination attempt in Britain using Novichok.
Instead, on his way to Helsinki, the President was busy hectoring, bullying and insulting traditional allies in Europe.
Interestingly, the adverse reaction to his buddying up to Putin went far beyond the usual suspects, the Democrats. Even Fox News hosts were stunned when Trump blamed US policies for souring relations with Russia.
Republican politicians spat the dummy. “One of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory,” said veteran senator John McCain. House Speaker Paul Ryan declared “there is no question” that Russia interfered in the election. The man Trump appointed as director of National Intelligence, Daniel Coats, issued a statement saying, “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.”
On Twitter, someone suggested it was as if John F Kennedy, in 1962, had shrugged and accepted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s lie that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba when US intelligence showed there were.
It was only after touching down at home that Trump declared that he had “misspoke”: he did believe Russia had been meddling and he backed his spy agencies’ assessment. Yeah, right.
How will Putin respond? Perhaps the dossier on Trump and Moscow from former MI6 agent Christopher Steele is correct and the Russians have compromising material on him. If so, I plead with Putin not to release the infamous “pee tape”. The world is traumatised enough.
Since the Romanovs, Russia has been interfering in the politics and life of other states.